"Of all the pantheon, Great Mother Nature has been the hardest to
kill."

C.S. Lewis

"In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess-we connect
with Her; through trees, animals, through other human beings, through
ourselves. She is here. She is within us all. She is the full circle: earth,
fire, water, and essence-body, mind, spirit, emotions, change."

Starhawk

"I will sing of well-founded Gaia, Mother of All, eldest of all
beings, she feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the
goodly land and all that are in the paths of the sea, and all that fly:
these are fed of her store."

Homer (7th century BCE)

"If we experience our connection to the finite and changing earth
deeply, then we must find the thought of its destruction and mutilation
intolerable."

Carol P. Christ

"You see me here, Lucius, in answer to your prayer. I am Nature, the
universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time,
sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the
immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses there
are.....though I am worshipped in many aspects , known by countless names,
and propitiated with all manner of different rites yet the whole round earth
venerates me."

Apuleius

The Golden Ass (The Goddess Isis speaks to Lucius)

*****

"Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and the
streets of Jerusalem?....The women knead dough to make cakes for the Queen
of Heaven." (Jeremiah 7:17-18)

"Then all the men which knew that their wives had burned incense
unto other gods, and all the women that stood by, a great multitude, even
all the people that dwelt in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered
Jeremiah, saying....we will certainly....burn incense to the Queen of
Heaven....as we have done...in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of
Jerusalem: for then....we....were well, and saw no evil....(and the women
said) when we burned incense....and poured out drink offerings to her, did
we make her cakes to worship her...without our men?" (Jeremiah,
44:14-19)

****

"The first step in the elevation of woman to her true position, as
an equal factor in human progress, is the cultivation of the religious
sentiment in regard to her dignity and equality, the recognition by the
rising generation of an ideal Heavenly Mother, to whom their prays should be
addressed, as well as to a Father.

If language has any meaning, we have in these texts a plain declaration
of the existence of the feminine element in the Godhead, equal in power and
glory with the masculine. The Heavenly Mother and Father."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Why indeed must "God" be a noun? Why not a verb-the most
active and dynamic of all? Hasn’t the naming of "God" as a noun
been an act of murdering that dynamic verb? And isn’t the Verb infinitely
more personal than a mere static noun? The anthromorphic symbols for God may
be intended to convey personality, but they fail to convey God is Be-ing.
Women now who are experiencing the shock of nonbeing and the surge of
self-affirmation against this are inclined to perceive transcendence as the
Verb in which we participate-live, move, and have our being. This Verb-the
Verb of Verbs- is intransitive. It need not be conceived as having an object
that limits dynamism."

Mary Daly

Beyond God the Father.

"We are told monotheism began with the Jews, that it was the great
"spiritual invention of the religious leader Moses." This is not
so. The worship of one God, like everything else in religion, began with the
worship of the Goddess."

Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

The Great Cosmic Mother

"The Queen of Heaven can often be identified by the particular
emphasis placed by her worshippers on baking and offering cakes to her. And
this was the case amongst the early Christian women's sect of Collyridians
who baked cakes in honour of Mary, Queen of Heaven. Such cake-making was a
feature of goddess worship throughout the Near East. A hymn to Ishtar
includes the lines:' O Ishtar, I have made a preparation of milk, cake
grilled bread and salt, hear me and be kind. Another hymn to her states: 'O
Ishtar, I look on your face, and I make an offering of pure milk with a
baked cake....Cakes baked and offered to the Queen of Skies may have had an
image of the goddess on them."

Asphodel P. Long

In A Chariot Drawn By Lions

"While the Queen of Heaven reigns in her own right, it has recently
been suggested that she be recognized as the consort of the King of Heaven,
that is, the Lord, Jahweh. And this raises the topic of God's one-ness; does
it include the female aspect as goddess or does God have a consort,
worshipped with Him, or separately? While it is usual to think of God's
biblical relationship with Israel as that of husband with wife, this is a
theological polemic. Today it is being suggested that God's consort or wife,
as much a deity as he himself, was acknowledged in the person of the Lady
Asherah, whom we have already met in the Canaanite tradition."

Asphodel P. Long

In a Chariot Drawn by Lions

"Why is it continually inferred that the age of the
"pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if
mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the
light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male
religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest
law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled
vehicles, ceramics, textiles, and written language were initially developed
in societies that worshipped the Goddess?"

Merlin Stone

"Yet other accounts tell of Adam’s first consort, Lilith, before
he was enchanted by Eve. Lilith was handmaiden to the Matronit, and she left
Adam because he tried to dominate her. Escaping to the Red Sea, she cried
"Why should I lie beneath you? I am your equal!’ A Sumerian
terracotta relief depicting Lilith (dating from around 2000 BC) shows her
naked and winged ,standing on the backs of two lions. Although not a goddess
in the traditional sense, her incarnate spirit was said to flourish in
Solomon’s most renowned lover, the Queen of Sheba. Lilith is described in
the book of the esoteric Mandeeans of Iraq as the "Daughter of the
Underworld.’ Throughout history to the present day she has represented the
fundamental ethic of female opportunity."

Bloodline of the Holy Grail

"The burning question remains: Why do women continue to give our
gifts-of spiritual devotion, of impassioned energy, of mental brightness, of
profound social concern-to-male-dominated and male-defined religious
institutions which are based, structurally and ideologically, on a searing
contempt and hatred for women?"

Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

The Great Cosmic Mother

"These heretical women – how audacious they are! They have no
modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to enact
exorcisms, to undertake cures, and it may be, even to baptize!

"Do you not know that everyone of you is an Eve? The sentence of God
on your sex lives on in this age…Women are the gate by which the demon
enters…weak women…it is on your account that Jesus died."

Tertuillian

"To say the people who worshipped the Goddess were deeply religious
would be to understate, and largely miss, the point. For here there was no
separation between the secular and the sacred. As religious historians point
out, in prehistoric and, to a large extent, well into historic times,
religion was life, and life was religion."

Riane Eisler

The Chalice and the Blade

"So, from the ‘Pyrenees to Lake Baikal, the evidence now is before
us of a late Stone Age mythology in which the outstanding single figure was
the Naked Goddess."